Single Muscle Fiber Physiology & Imaging Analysis

This laboratory contains three complete single muscle fiber physiology stations, each including: Olympus microscope with video camera attached, mechanical positioner and force transducer, Nicolet NIC-310 Oscilloscope, Olympus dissecting microscope, temperature controller with integrated peltier cells, amplifier and position/force controller of single fibers, Windows based computers with customized software for data acquisition and analysis. There are also five single muscle cell/fiber isolation stations each with an Olympus dissecting microscope and articulating arm, non-heating light source, and custom dissecting platform. All stations are video output ready, with one cell isolation station directly video linked to an external LG LCD monitor to aid in micro-homogenization and processing.

Image Analysis: A Macintosh G5 with tracing pad and NIH Image J analysis software and dedicated software to analyze images transferred from MRI and CT imagers, as well as tissue sections. An Olympus BX51 microscope and DP30 monochrome digital camera interfaced with MicroSuite FIVE software application package for bright field and fluorescence immunohistochemistry. A microtome/cryostat is also housed in this room for sectioning tissue samples.